What’s the best thing to do with your time? To become real. But what does that even mean?

Well, as my friend pointed out, it’s the process of making the story you tell yourself — the idealized you, a tangible reality, where there is no delay or separation between your perception of self and the objective self that interacts with the world around oneself. This is the real goal of studying and practicing magic, martial arts, or a religion. They all have different means of achieving this, stimulating different paths of awareness through the body or the mind, but they aim to get to this point. A crappy curriculum of path is one that does not actually have this in the syllabus.

But just because the aforementioned methods are ways of reaching this, they are no guarantee. Most folks practicing these things are floating around helplessly just like anyone doing anything in this world. Plus, what is the ultimate point of enlightenment, or total cessation of attachments and cravings? Well, there is no point in the tangible sense, because it is the place where points are dissolved entirely. And I think I heard Ajahn Brahm say, enlightenment is actually very boring.

When people create the causes for enlightenment, as they describe in Buddhism, by laying down good karma — a good rhythm, to attaining nirvana in this life or the next, they are effectively embedding the rhythm toward that experience or dissolution of enlightenment into the intrinsic fabric of their being and mental developments. Thus the desire becomes inherent to the self-clinging being taking birth and the enlightenment is no longer such a blatant desire. If the drive toward enlightenment is buried deeply enough and forgotten (made automatic), one begins to simply manifest it, now and forever. It will sneak up on you, create an innate moral quality, guide you from beyond your intellect.

Desire is blatant and therefore must be sublimated to the subconscious to really become effective in one’s life. If one can burn out the desire for enlightenment by going in the right direction towards that experience, they are creating good causes. They are pushing enlightenment into their mind until they manifest it fully. But it has to happen subtly — big enlightenment experiences are usually the stuff ambitious crackpots or intermediate students. You don’t go to heaven, you grow into heaven, to borrow a phrase from the old-school New-Ager, Edgar Cayce. Enlightenment comes to you throughout your whole life, like the expanding, full-on deafening roar of water crashing toward you through a tunnel. Every kind of understanding happens like this, until we’re floating in the water, which is our experience made reality.

Here’s the deal: I’m not a big fan of turning my soul over to other people. I’m not into letting other people lead me by the hand. And I’m sure as hell not about to willingly give up my body to a bunch of random spirits that aren’t from my neighborhood.

You know what else? I don’t like all this talk from religious folks about “the highest wisdom” or understanding. Sounds nice, but the practice of having tantric sex with female consorts to promulgate worshiped deities so they can live on in our samsaric world and further continue to have a bunch of tantric sex under holy pretexts sounds like a scam to me.

What pisses me off is those people will resort to saying, “this is the one true way” or “this is the fastest method”. I’m just saying, if there’s a faster method to reality, there’s a catch. I know guys like Bradley Warner don’t have much in the way of an extensive vocabulary or particularly profound view or artistic expression, but he’s right when he says you can’t let people do your work for you. If there’s a tantric method to speeding up awakening you’re either (A) getting possessed by a foreign spirit or entity or (B) being fed an illusion of what the primordial state is and working from there or (C) being fed a placebo. That’s fine if it works, but you still didn’t get there yourself, and even if you’re just being given an illusion that’s not that much different than a mushroom trip.

And to say “you don’t understand this method until you’ve experienced it” is making a lot of wily, denigrating claims about other people’s experiences. It also sets off an alarm in my mind. I, like many others on the path to reality, have looked at sutras, black magick grimoires, done a lot of shamanic drugs, met martial arts masters, done various meditations, qi circulation, Western hermetics. I’ve also been to a lot of haunted locations, shrines, battlegrounds, and war and pagan burial sites. I don’t think I’m incapable of figuring out when something is a spiritual possession, ya know? And for those who are wondering, I’m not a pervert about finding these energies, nor am I an obnoxious encyclopedia of knowledge.

I’ve realized, I can’t wake up by throwing my faith in some other person. Faith is only real when it comes from personal experience and insight. And even then, you have faith in your path as achieving the specific results you want to achieve. It’s not some flawless path with flawless results while it exists in the world. I agree that there might be a level of experience or dwelling that involves something beyond comprehension on the conventional level of existence, but it’s still a path you create for yourself and it arises out of faith. On some level, people are creating their own truth. When belief in truth is strong enough, it will manifest in a multi-dimensional reality.

I’m not necessarily trying to rag on people, and I’m not deluded into thinking I’m so wise or that I have all the answers. Still, I know a few things that are worthwhile. Being a good person is worth doing because if you don’t do it, no one else will. The reason people are cynical and jaded and resentful of the world is often because they themselves are not such great people. Being good is largely a product of taming the mind and pointing it towards worthwhile pursuits.

So, if you lie and lust after sex, food and want to make a lot of money, but somehow get fucked over… it’s not such a surprise because it’s not like you were a particularly good person in the first place. You didn’t have your priorities down clearly in a way that would allow you to foresee calamity. Not that you deserved a beat-down, but being a good person takes very strong conviction in improving things for the best, can help one avoid or deal with problems, and doesn’t result in some kind of radical, shallow or politically-correct goodness.